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Whats the big deal about BING?07/31/09

Microsoft released their latest search engine, Bing, on June 3rd, 2009. Now that the dust has settled and a new deal between Yahoo and Microsoft will have about 25% of the search engine market share using BING, we thought it was time to give it a whirl and check it out.

First, Microsoft touts that it is more than a simple “search engine”; they call it a “decision engine”. The intent is to bring more than just web pages to the results – it is supposed to bring all kinds of relevant and related information to the user to allow them to make informed decisions.

To start off with, we decided to check results on some of our highly optimized sites. We ran several search comparisons along certain key phrases that we use both for ourselves and our clients. The top results in Bing were fairly comparable to Google. Some highlights of our study included:

BING still falls prey to some spamming. It’s not as bad as their previous search engines. There’s a known SEO spam site in particular that we watch from time to time that is not in the top 30 results in Google on a certain key phrase. However, that website comes up around 6th on BING. Other websites that just repeat keywords over and over tend to rank higher in BING than in Google.

BING seems to weigh keywords in your domain name slightly higher than Google. It’s always best to have a keyword rich domain name, but it appears that the keyword rich domain name is valued slightly higher with BING.

BING appears to place a lesser value on pages deeper into your hierarchical structure than Google. Typically, the further down a page is in the hierarchical structure, the lesser the amount of inbound links and PageRank the page has. However, Google appears to not weigh that as much as BING.

So what does this mean to business owners trying to get their website ranked well so that potential customers can find them in search engines?

The answer seems pretty clear. Continue to use the same best-practice search engine optimization techniques you use for Google. There’s not a magic bullet to get your site ranked in BING. Clean, well-formed HTML with the appropriate use of tags and keywords, user friendly URLs and linking strategies are still the best method. Hard work and best practices still pay off.